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TRYING: LOVE, LOOSE PANTS AND THE QUEST FOR A BABY Copyright Š Mark Cossey, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers. Mark Cossey has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Condition of Sale This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Summersdale Publishers Ltd 46 West Street Chichester West Sussex PO19 1RP UK www.summersdale.com
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Contents Prologue: Masturbatum Contra Mundum..............................7
Part 1: Try Hard Chapter 1: Loose Pants........................................................22 Chapter 2: The Schedule......................................................39 Chapter 3: Everybody’s Pregnant But We Just Feel the Same.....................................................54 Chapter 4: Veni, Vidi, Fini....................................................69 Chapter 5: Money, Irony and Lies........................................85 Chapter 6: The Wicked Witch of South Morden..................99 Chapter 7: Results All Round.............................................114
Part 2: Try Harder Chapter 8: Artificial Intelligence.........................................128 Chapter 9: North London Restaurant Incident...................143
Chapter 10: Do You Really Want It?..................................158 Chapter 11: Death of Sex...................................................171 Chapter 12: Life’s a Picnic.................................................185 Chapter 13: Back to School................................................203 Chapter 14: A Brief Perimenopause in the Fabric of Time....213 Chapter 15: Casualties.......................................................226
Part 3: Try Hard with a Vengeance Chapter 16: First Girlfriend................................................242 Chapter 17: One Last Stab at It..........................................254 Chapter 18: The Grain of Rice...........................................268
Epilogue: You Never Really Make It..................................279
Prologue
Masturbatum Contra Mundum ‘Here again, Mr Cossey?’ asked the young Spanish embryologist, shooting me a welcoming smile as I followed him down the corridor. He had recognised me by sight and that wasn’t good. I was now the one thing you don’t want to be in a fertility clinic. A regular. ‘Here again,’ I agreed, enthusiasm stapled across my face as we shuffled past various women going through various stages of not getting pregnant. I was desperately trying to maintain an air of virile, energetic masculinity, but the truth was I was knackered: partly because of encroaching middle age, partly because I had spent the previous night in the bath getting divorced. The whole thing had been, at least partially, Martha’s fault; she was the one who first brought up the subject. She was the one who sat on the cold tiles of our bathroom floor, fiddling 7
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with her wedding ring, a handful of pasta pesto I had thrown at her congealing in her hair, and asked: ‘What about an amicable divorce?’ We had been fighting. The fight had been triggered by the worst words in the world; words that had dogged us for the last few years, words that Martha had uttered an hour before, in tears, during the ad break of Location, Location, Location. ‘I just want,’ she had said, ‘a baby.’ These were the words tearing us apart. Of course the whole idea of a polite break-up was ridiculous. For starters, Martha and I couldn’t argue amicably about anything. We were the most incompetent arguers ever. We couldn’t even fight about normal couply things: our biggest disagreement up to this point had been about the number of dimensions a cloud has. Three, by the way. Clouds, like every other object in the universe, have three dimensions. Not two. Nothing with mass has only two dimensions. It’s infuriating. But that night even the cloud argument seemed like a fond memory. This fight was different. This was about us being an infertile couple and whether or not we could survive that fact. This was bigger than the clouds. I lay in the bath, lit a Marlboro Red and drew deeply. It seemed as good a time as any to take up smoking again. Then I tried to think of an answer to Martha’s question… Then I was back at the clinic. ‘This time we have better luck, no?’ The Spaniard patted my shoulder manfully, guiding me closer to my fate. Luck. I wondered if my reproductive organs could, for once, find some. My brain and penis were already united in their 8
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opposition to producing anything that day. In fact, they had made it clear that if I wanted to see any action in the sperm-producing department, I’d better find them better working conditions. ‘We’re not fourteen,’ they chorused. ‘We’re forty. We need comfort, privacy, access to your wife and/or the Internet. For pity’s sake, we can’t just put out in an NHS hospital. Gone are the glory days, the days when just being near a lingerie catalogue gave us an erection, when sitting on a bus sent us into orgasmic delight.’ ‘Gone’, clanged the bells of my masculine doom, ‘gone’. They were right, of course, but this wasn’t about me anymore. For the sum total of our married life, Martha and I had been descending into the painful, humiliating and surreal world of people who are childless but don’t want to be. We had watched our friends start their families. We had been misunderstood, shouted at, pitied – and I wasn’t sure which was worse. Martha had been prodded, scanned, stabbed, inseminated, overstimulated, and gone through the menopause. We had discovered the meaning of the word ‘ferning’. All in our desire to have a baby. So it didn’t matter that I felt about as frisky as a eunuch who’d slept in a bath or that work kept calling me about something to do with sheep and a TV presenter, without any clarity about which sheep and what had gone wrong whilst filming them. It didn’t matter that Martha had walked out earlier that morning without saying a word. Today none of that mattered. Today I just had to produce sperm – potent, healthy sperm. The future existence of my family depended on it. We stopped outside a door. There was no sign, but I knew what lay behind that beech veneer. Every man who has ever 9
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gone down the road of a medically assisted pregnancy knows. It didn’t need a name and anyway what would you call it? A masturbatory? The ejaculatum? I wondered what happened when the architects met to discuss a new clinic: ‘Right, we’ve got the theatre, recovery, the labs, reception… hey, what’s this little room here?’ ‘Where?’ ‘Just next to the toilets.’ ‘Oh, nothing.’ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Well, you know it’s… for men.’ ‘For men?’ ‘You know, to do men’s stuff.’ ‘Men’s stuff?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘And we don’t have a name for that?’ ‘It’s just men’s stuff.’ ‘We could call it the phall…’ ‘Look, no one really wants to talk about it, OK?’ The room’s furnishings followed the same, don’t-mention-theW-word philosophy. The spartan table and chair assumed that any man can and will achieve orgasm under any conditions short of a sustained artillery assault. That every man has the power to conjure up an erection purely from the memory of Samantha Thomson’s breasts in the sixth form. On one side was an en suite bathroom to ‘clean yourself up afterwards’ as one of the female embryologists had put it. What did she think happened? Some kind of uncontrolled 10
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explosion? Did other men create a post-ejaculatory mess of such biblical proportions that they needed a wash? I must have been a disappointment. Indeed, I’m positive she sighed each time she was faced with my modest efforts, holding up my samples as if to say: ‘Come on, Mr Cossey, is that it?’ To which the answer should have been ‘Yes, it fucking is’, but then you can’t piss off the embryologists. Who knows what revenge they might wreak? No, when a young, blonde, female sperm-expert examines your finest efforts with a disparaging frown, it’s best to walk away with what’s left of your tail between your legs. Mercifully, this time I had the Spaniard who surely had a clearer grasp of the process involved. He motioned me into the purgatorial chamber. ‘Don’t forget to lock,’ he said. They said that every time. Maybe it was part of their training, maybe they were tested on it. ‘Should the door to the wankatorium be locked or unlocked? Discuss in 500 words or less.’ Maybe they said it because it is the kind of thing you’re likely to forget when attempting to self-stimulate in a public place. Who wouldn’t leave the door slightly ajar whilst coaxing their uncooperative member into life? They’ve seen it all before, right? Well, except that blonde one. I’m not sure what she’d seen before; had she been conducting fertility experiments on her boyfriend? Turning him into some kind of terrifying penile fire hose? I assured the Spaniard that the door would be sealed before my phallus greeted the fluorescent lights of the clinic. He nodded, then he paused a minute. Then he gave a small tut. He 11
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stroked his goatee beard. Finally he pointed at a black folder resting on the side table. ‘The magazines,’ he announced, as if heralding the arrival of Hannibal Lecter for dinner. His tanned, chiselled face seemed to blush. Once again I mused: why mention this? It was not beyond me to work out what was inside the sole unmarked folder in a room where men came to ‘do their business’. Maybe they didn’t have pornography in Spain? Or was English porn, like its cuisine, too stodgy and tasteless for his Latin blood? His expression gave away nothing. ‘I know,’ I mumbled, attempting to share his shame about the folder. ‘Of course,’ he shrugged. ‘You are, how do we say it, a regular.’ Then he left me to it. Embryologists, I’ve noticed, never shake hands. I stood still for a moment. He was right. I did know all about it. I knew about ‘Club Hardcore’ and ‘Big Ones’ and ‘Amateur Housewives’. I’d spent too long in that room; long enough to see the NHS refresh and replace their selection of Britain’s worst dirty magazines many times. Long enough to know exactly which material the St William’s Trust were inclined towards and what tastes were catered for. Long enough to wonder why ‘Swedish Schoolgirls’ had been removed from the list. Two years, I thought, picking up the black folder. Two long years I had known this room. I locked the door and then I was alone. My back ached. I wished I hadn’t actually slept in the bath. I wished I had slept on the sofa like any other normal idiot. Most of all, I wished I had slept in the bed with Martha, but 12
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that would have been impossible. The argument had gone too far. Back in the bathroom she’d sat up and was attempting to remove the remaining pasta from her scalp with a hairbrush. ‘You really want a divorce?’ I asked, studying her face in the mirror; but she simply looked into the air intensely, her lips slightly pursed, her breathing shallow. ‘I just…’ But she couldn’t finish the sentence. She couldn’t say the words that had started the argument. She couldn’t say them because they were the worst words in the world. But I could hear them, and they cut through me. ‘Fine,’ I shouted. ‘But it won’t be amicable. It will be the worst divorce in the history of divorces ever. It will be the 9/11 of divorces. I will take divorce to a new level!’ ‘A new level?’ she snapped. ‘Will it be a Level 7 Wizard divorce? Will you slay the divorce dragons with your +5 divorcing mace?’ This was unfair. I grew up in a small town and there was nothing else to do except play Dungeons and Dragons. I kept the manuals purely for sentimental and investment purposes. ‘At least I can have a child when I’m seventy!’ I shouted. It was a dirty, low blow. Martha paused a moment, then threw the brush at me and stormed out of the room. I slumped further into the bath and smoked my Marlboro and realised that, once again, it was just possible I had overreacted. We had no idea why we couldn’t have a child. Like so many couples our infertility was unexplained. It could be her, it could be me, it could be the combination of both of us, but that just seemed to make the whole thing worse: theoretically a baby could turn up at any time. It just hadn’t. 13
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And now Martha was lying in the other room sobbing over the state of our marriage. How had it come to this? I pushed the scene out of my mind – this was not the time to think of Martha crying, or the bath, or those terrible words. This was the time to wank. The aim of my visit, if you haven’t quite clocked on yet, was simple: to arouse myself, masturbate, and shoot/scrape/in some way deliver my sperm into a 50-ml specimen jar and then deliver this effort to the embryologist. Later my sperm would be introduced to Martha’s eggs and then maybe, just maybe, the heavens would smile on us and give us what we were so desperate for: a baby. For that to happen, it was critical I got this ejaculation right. Of course how to achieve an accurate ejaculation is never explained. No instructions are ever printed out, you are just expected to know what to do. You are asked for ‘a sample’ on the assumption that you know what kind of sample to produce and how to package it into a small plastic container. It’s not a big thing, this jar. You could miss. Professionals do. Male porn stars (I’ve heard) are always missing whatever it is they’re supposed to hit, and yet I’m sure they don’t have to crawl around afterwards, cleaning up their mess and hoping no one notices. And when they do miss they probably get some kind of on-the-job training, and everyone in the production says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Guy Norm-Ass, happens to the best of us.’ In short, I imagine they get some guidance on the matter of how to aim sperm. Not in the NHS. If I missed, I was on my own. There was no one to tell me what to do; did I clean it up off the ground 14
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and hope that no one noticed? Was that hygienic? Did I tell someone that I’d ‘lost’ my contribution to a £5,000 operation because at the crucial moment my mobile went off, sending my potential firstborn all over ‘Lesbian Lovers’ and that strangely absorbent shirt I happened to be wearing? Did I ask for another go? Sadly I couldn’t – I’d have been saving this lot up in my testicles for days to maximise the quantity and quality of my ‘output’. I would have been under strict instructions to bring in a big cheery load of happy, healthy sperm, not some sloppy seconds because I found it difficult to aim. Meanwhile, out in reception, Martha had probably arrived, still upset and angry, her ovulation pinpointed to a single hour of this specific morning by a month-long regime of drugs, scans, pokes and probes. Success rested on a few well-placed millilitres of uncooperative goo. Miss, and I would destroy months of painful and expensive work, add to the years of heartache, and put the future of my bloodline at risk. Miss, and I would let down my wife, my family, and deny my own child its very existence. Miss? You don’t miss. I pushed these thoughts out of my mind, sat down, and tried to relax. Then it came back to me: the chair. The anti-wank chair. The armchair designed to stop you getting any kind of angle where gravity might assist you with the job in hand. The chair which ensures that your container remains upside down at all times, so even if you somehow hit the mark, your sperm will simply dribble back down the sides. I wriggled around and tried some new positions, undiscovered in my decades-long exploration of the masturbatory arts, but 15
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the anti-wank chair had been designed by some kind of genius: a shadowy figure whose love of chairs was only matched by his desire to prevent the continuation of the human species. Another thought crept into my mind. I wondered how many of my fellow ejaculators had sat on that very chair, and how many arses, au naturel, had touched the cheap fabric before I’d rested my sorry butt on it. My mind became full of the endless number of sweaty male posteriors that had shuffled, squirmed and squatted on this de Sade-inspired piece of furniture, desperate to find some workable position. With a Herculean effort, I forced these thoughts from my mind. I picked up the container, grasped my shrivelled manhood and tried to open a well-thumbed magazine. Then I thought: how long do I have? All eternity seemed too short, yet I knew that back in reception there were a dozen other men waiting for their own turn in this little piece of hell. No pressure, I told myself, no pressure. And for a while there was no pressure. Anywhere. More time passed. I began to panic; I frantically peeled back the pages of ‘Teenage Teasers’ in a vain attempt to entice my reproductive organ back to life. Then, in a final coup d’état my brain reminded me that, at this very moment, maybe fifty people knew exactly what I was doing. They knew because this is the only time during the treatment of infertility that the man gets called up on his own. By name. Ten minutes before I had sat there, in the waiting room, with the other women and their other halves, with a few nurses, reception staff, the odd doctor and the bloke who empties the bins. I had read my paper and texted and just prayed for an Immaculate Conception, anything to get my mind off what I was about to do. 16
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Then the Spanish embryologist had called out. ‘Mr Cossey?’ I had squeezed past another couple, the woman smiling sympathetically, as if to let me know ‘Look, it’s none of my business, but good luck with that wank.’ Her partner had raised an eyebrow, war veteran to war veteran: ‘Focus on the wank, focus on the wank,’ he had seemed to communicate telepathically. I had strolled past the rest of the assembled crowd, all thinking ‘There goes Mr Cossey, off to have a wank. Anyone got a stopwatch?’ Then I had signed for my pygmy-sized jism jar and then I was back in the room with the magazines and the en suite bathroom. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore it all and then…my phone rang. This is the other thing you must do before a scheduled wank. Turn the phone off. Not to ‘vibrate’, that can cause its own problems, but ‘off’. Otherwise, you’ll do what I always did and pull it out to see who’s calling. It was Martha. I didn’t hesitate – I was desperate to hear her voice. ‘I just want a baby,’ she whispered. In the background I could hear the reception filling up with other women wanting exactly the same thing. I winced. I just want a baby. The worst words in the world. Of all the words ever conceived these were the most heartwrenching, soul-destroying words in existence. They told me that the one thing Martha truly wanted I couldn’t give her. If she’d wanted a Mulberry handbag or a flock of Albanian goats or democracy in North Korea, then I would have been in with a chance, but a baby? It seemed impossible. 17
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‘I know,’ I said, hearing a crack in my voice. Here was my failure laid before me. Martha was thirty-three. She still had time to find someone else, to try again. There was still time for a civilised separation. We both knew it. There was a pause, a long, long pause. I sat motionless on the anti-wank chair with my trousers around my ankles and waited for the end. ‘But,’ her voice trembled. ‘Only with you. I don’t want a baby with anyone else but you.’ The air fell out of my lungs. I bowed my head and rubbed the back of my neck. Only with me. The world’s most incompetent domestic dispute had come to an end and the Cosseys were through it. We were back in the game, ready to face everything that was being thrown at us. ‘Now,’ Martha’s voice was suddenly all calm and steel. ‘You get going and you wank like you’re wanking for England.’ I put the phone down. I stood up and punched the air and did a little victory dance. To be fair it was more of a victory shuffle due to the position of my trousers, but there was new wind in my sail now; I may have been a man with an undiagnosed fertility issue, but I had sperm, an almost perfected technique for putting it in a jar, and I wasn’t getting an amicable divorce from the woman I loved. It was time to get a grip on myself. Literally. I sat down, took my penis in my hand, picked up a pornographic magazine, then put it down because the irony was I couldn’t hold a magazine and a jar and self-stimulate at the same time, and then… and then I wanked. I wanked because Martha and I desperately wanted a baby. We really did. We had been trying for forever. I felt like I’d let her down a hundred times, this woman who I’d always wanted to give everything to. I’d lived with her disappointment for 18
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months and then years. I’d seen the pain inside her eyes grow, and felt more powerless than I’d ever imagined. So, with my member finally pointing optimistically towards the ceiling, I called out to God, Fate and medical science that this time, this time we’d get lucky. I went back to the reception and saw Martha sitting at the back, texting on her BlackBerry, biting her nails. This was our sixth round of fertility treatment, and like everyone in that waiting room, we were scared. Scared of never having a baby, scared of never being able to share the love we had with our own flesh and blood. Scared? We were terrified. I sat down next to my wife. She took hold of my arm tightly, as if I might disappear: but I wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Asif Iqbal,’ the Spanish embryologist called out. Mr Iqbal was sitting next to me and something about him suggested it was his first time. He got up gingerly and our eyes met. Two men, masturbating for their family’s future, hoping against hope for that one simple miracle of life. We saluted each other with the wry half-smile of men going into battle for those they love. Martha squeezed tighter on my arm. Even now she refused to bow to the fear, refused to give up, refused to let the whole thing take over her life. We were OK. We didn’t know whether we would ever have a child of our own, but we knew that, whatever happened, we would get through it together. Then we settled down to do what you do most of when trying for a baby: we waited. This is our story of infertility, how we got through it, and what it means to be a couple when one of the most fundamental things is denied to you. This is a story about despair, love and masturbation. And most of all this is the story about Jimmy, 19
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our son, who finally made it into the world thanks to Martha, medical science, and a wank in a little room out the back of St William’s hospital.
20
PART 1
TRY HARD
Chapter 1
Loose Pants ‘It’s fine,’ Martha said, trying not to look me in the eye. It wasn’t. I’d just carried my new wife over the threshold and already things weren’t going to plan. In front of us, in the hotel’s so-called honeymoon suite, were two single beds and a half-full ashtray next to the TV. ‘For who?’ I asked. ‘Celibate smokers?’ Martha disentangled herself from my arms, sat down on one of the beds, and began to test the mattress. On the far side of the room a tropical fish tank rested precariously on a side table. Its inhabitants regarded us wearily, as though they had seen it all before. ‘Come on,’ she said, optimistically bouncing up and down. ‘It’ll be fun.’ I didn’t want our wedding night to be fun. I wanted it to be perfect and this wasn’t the way I imagined our nuptials being consummated. Whatever that meant. I began outlining a letter of complaint in my mind when perfection suffered another blow: something was floating at the top of the tank. 22
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We approached the object gingerly, Martha still in her wedding dress, and studied it for a moment. ‘It looks pretty dead,’ Martha pronounced, sniffing the air. She was being kind; it was far beyond dead, it was decomposing. We were witnessing a dead fish rotting in its own warm bath. ‘I’ll sort this,’ I said manfully, striding out the door, embracing with gusto the new responsibilities of a married man. An hour later the situation remained unsorted. I had, however, managed to get caught up in the middle of a fight between the core fan base of a Scottish football team and a Korean receptionist who couldn’t see what was wrong with our sleeping arrangements. ‘You’re lucky – you have the fish,’ he assured me. ‘Not everyone gets the fish.’ It was weirdly impossible to argue against this, especially with twenty middle-aged men from Aberdeen chanting something that was possibly racist. I returned shamefaced to our room, only to find my wife with another man. ‘Who’s he?’ I asked. ‘He’s here about the dead thing,’ Martha beamed, now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt saying ‘Mrs Cossey’. ‘Come on – we’ve got a new room.’ ‘Really?’ ‘And we’ve been upgraded!’ she said, laughing. And so we were. Our new room smelled clean, had a kingsized bed and, of course, an even bigger fish tank. It was also brighter than an operating theatre. What is it about lighting in hotels? You’ve either got the wattage of a tanning booth or a Nordic crime thriller. It’s beyond me why they can’t just have 23
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a single button marked, I don’t know, ‘lights’, which allows you to either have or not have a reasonable amount of light. But no, instead you have to go on a light-switch hunt. ‘You’re not worrying about the lights again?’ Martha asked, removing Mrs Cossey and unbuckling her belt. ‘The lights are OK.’ I wasn’t listening, and anyway I’d started the search now. Incentivised by the removal of clothing, I hurriedly began to dim or turn off the uplighters, table lamps, spotlights and illuminated mirrors. Even the fish tank was sent into darkness so we could have some privacy from its boggle-eyed prisoners. Eventually a faultless ambience was achieved and the rest, as they say, was history. It certainly was for the fish that had just lost power to their heated ecosystem. ‘OK, Mrs Cossey?’ I asked later, safe in the knowledge that we were, finally, very OK. ‘Very OK, Mr Cossey,’ Martha nodded. It was a perfect end to a nearish perfect day, and we had done what we’d promised ourselves: we had kicked off married life with our first attempt at trying for a baby. Already we were probably just nine months from starting our own family. This had all been agreed three and half years before, just hours after our first kiss, on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘We should get married,’ I’d said, watching the late-night revellers milling in Trafalgar Square. ‘Can we?’ Martha asked, resting her head on my shoulder. ‘And can we have a baby? I’d like a baby.’ ‘A baby,’ I nodded, our lives mapped out on the London vista in front of us. We never imagined it would require anything else to make those two things happen except us. We just assumed we would 24
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get pregnant normally. I didn’t actually know what that meant, but that was all right because I was the man, and to kick off a ‘normal’ pregnancy I only had to get one thing right. My role could be summed up with two simple words: deliver sperm. After that I imagined myself lying back for nine months, escaping endless birthing classes, vetoing names for my firstborn, and studying ultrasound pictures which suggested a genetic similarity to the Moomins. Then I would panic when the moment came, drive the wrong way to the hospital, and feign surprise when Martha didn’t appear at all supportive during labour. ‘Look, I thought going up the A25 would be quicker.’ ‘I’m going to cut it off!’ she would cry. ‘Then I could have moved onto the A516 and avoided the traffic. Surely you can see how that might work?’ ‘I’m going to cut if off and then stick it up your…’ A few hours later I would be holding a peaceful, sleeping little baby in my arms and that would be that. Job done. Martha’s role, in contrast, was ever so slightly more involved: her body had to design and build a completely new life form from scratch, turn it into a healthy mini-human and get it to the showroom in exactly nine months – all without looking. This is why men need high-status jobs and expensive timepieces. Otherwise where would we be on a first date? ‘So, what do you do?’ ‘Create life.’ ‘Wow. Kind of like a god.’ 25
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Long uncomfortable silence. ‘And you?’ ‘Delivery man.’ Because of this imbalance in the distribution of labour, men and women think about fertility differently. Or rather women actually do think about it, which is what Martha was doing one sunny April afternoon, four months into married life, as we lay on our bed, happily content with yet another successful ‘delivery’. ‘Do you think we have a problem?’ she said, staring up at the ceiling. Contentment ran off. What problem? How could there possibly be a problem? Had I lost my job? Had Martha been faking orgasms? Cancer? Did we have collective cancer? Was it possible to have collective cancer? ‘You know, a problem having a baby,’ she continued, putting on her glasses to emphasise the seriousness of the question. I relaxed. Contentment returned, apologising for the sudden departure. I knew my wife was a creative sort and was prone to having a socalled ‘imagination’. I also knew, as a man, that this concern was unnecessary. Infertility was something that happened to other people. ‘Roo,’ I said. Yes, OK, we have pet names. Our pet names for each other are ‘Roo’ and ‘Boo’, though after ten years together it’s still not clear who’s Roo and who’s Boo. We are working on that. ‘Boo,’ I said. ‘We’ve been trying for all of four months. We just need to be patient.’ ‘Hmm,’ she nodded, which was the international sign for Martha not being patient. Then she turned towards me and out 26
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of nowhere produced a three-pack of Marks and Spencer’s finest boxer shorts. I studied this new arrival thoughtfully. ‘These are too big,’ I said, handing them back. I didn’t have that much of middle-age spread. ‘I know. It’s to help your motility,’ she replied. ‘My mobility?’ ‘Motility – you know what motility is, don’t you?’ This is the problem with women. You think you’re having a conversation about, say, ill-fitting underwear, but turns out you’re actually discussing testicular biology, a subject which had never come up in the four years we had shared the same bed. Martha explained that the Internet had told her that sperm motility was the key to getting pregnant and that a more comfortable fit around the male genitalia would assist this. ‘You could also consider a looser cut of trouser,’ she went on. ‘Like MC Hammer?’ ‘Worked for him.’ You couldn’t argue with the evidence. MC Hammer’s trousers could house a Bedouin tribe and he’s had five kids – despite telling everyone they can’t touch it. I wore the pants. For the sake of my wife, some dodgy science, and the cotton industry, I spent the first part of every morning looking like Sinbad on a beach holiday, and this was our first tentative step in a long struggle to have a baby. Those pants were a symbol of a battle that starts with loose boxer shorts and ends with the illegal purchase of a child in China. Loose underwear was a Rubicon crossed: Martha and I had entered the world of assisted conception. Sadly the pants strategy proved ineffective. Both as undergarments and as fertility enhancers, they were useless. 27
TRYING
Two more months passed and Martha was still not pregnant. I began to notice other changes around the flat. ‘Why,’ I shouted one morning from the loo, ‘is my 1997 copy of Wisden buried under a pile of pregnancy tests?’ ‘Got to be sure,’ Martha shouted back. Sure? I wondered. Wouldn’t it become obvious soon enough? Surely nature had its own ways of letting you know a baby was on its way? ‘Just look at the Argos catalogue,’ she chirped. That seemed to have survived the invasion, I noted. I didn’t want to read the Argos catalogue. I didn’t like the Argos catalogue. I calmed myself; if it helps us get a baby, I thought, then let’s read the damn catalogue. I opened the bible of shopping onto garden furniture. Around this time Martha also started coming to bed shivering with extreme cold. She would crawl under the duvet, her teeth chattering, and nuzzle up to me. ‘Are you sick?’ I asked. ‘C-cold bath,’ she shivered. ‘Cold bath?’ ‘Just a pr-pr-precaution…’ Eventually she admitted that she had read somewhere (i.e. the Internet again) how hot baths could cause embryos to spontaneously die. Or explode or something, I can’t remember the details, but the result was that for the next two weeks Martha went without hot water, all in the hope of getting pregnant. ‘You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?’ she asked one night, mentally preparing herself for the bath ahead. I didn’t know how to respond. To be honest, I thought she was crackers, but in a sweet, superficial and endearing way. 28
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